The ROBLOX Time Machine
I used to be a pretty frequent player of ROBLOX since late 2007, although I must say I felt it had become quite dull. Constantly playing obstacle courses, murder games, tycoon games, and prison simulating games had become quite boring to me. They were always filled with exploiters or people who just plain did not know how to play the game, and it annoyed me. Looking back at it, I wish I had stuck with those "boring" games. One day, while browsing the catalog, a random popup appeared. Normally advertisements for games on ROBLOX appear in just a small banner on the top or the right of the page, but this one was a pop-up. Stranger still, it had animated and flashing text. The pop up was advertising the "ROBLOX Time Machine", with a sticker on the right that said "REALLY WORKS!" I got quite interested and figured that it might have been an event by ROBLOX, so I clicked on it. It brought me to a standard place page, but there were a few things I had noticed. First of all, the creators name was simply just "Time", and his user ID was 5. This struck me as odd, because I am sure that when I was little I probably tried that ID and I don't remember it ever existing. Second, the game's ID was 100. This seemed to imply that this game was made very early in ROBLOX's history, and not for some event. As for the thumbnail, all it showed was well, the giant time machine. Now, this time machine wasn't the DeLorean, or a police phone booth, it was more like a giant chromium ball with a door. That's the best way I can describe it, really. When I went into the game, I was surprised that the thumbnail wasn't misleading - that was actually what was there. And that's all that was there, really, aside from the standard spawn location and a baseplate. I'll tell you this, it was quite well built. VERY well built, actually - probably one of the most decent builds I have seen on ROBLOX, although definitely not impossible to make with the current engine. When I stepped inside, I was greeted with a very basic control panel - I was kind of disappointed after what I had seen outside. The control panel had a date on it, "Nov. 4, 2017" which was the current date at the time. There were buttons you would use to adjust the month, date, and year. It was also seemingly programmed to know when the end of the month was - e.g. if you had it on December 31 and you switched it to February, it would automatically switch to the 28th (or 29th, if it was a leap year)s and there wasn't a way to increase it. I was extremely impressed with the amount of effort that went into this. Surely there had to be more, so to test it out I simply went to the day prior - Nov. 3, 2017. To travel back, all you did was pull a giant Dr. Frankenstein-styled lever. There was a giant LSD-style "transition" that took up the entire screen. When I stepped outside there was... nothing, to say the least. I was a bit disappointed, but realized I probably didn't go far enough into the past, so this time I choose a date in the actual past - Nov. 3, 2012. Again, after an LSD transition scene, nothing had apparently changed. Well, actually, a few things did. Number one was the player list - it was back to the old style, likt it was in 2012. The GUI was also changed, like it was back in 2012. And when I stepped outside, the skybox was, as you would expect - the default one from 2012. I also had noticed that my character was dressed like he was back in 2012. This is when I should have noticed something was very wrong, but I was instead extremely impressed and figured it was definitely for some kind of event for ROBLOX - maybe cashing in the "nostalgia craze" that had been going on. For nostalgic purposes, I went back to the exact day that I joined - Oct 26, 2007. There was another transition scene, and now I was back in 2007. As you probably guessed, the GUI and all was exactly like it was in 2007, and I could even move again using the green circle. I also looked like the standard 2007 "noob" character. The time machine still looked very realistic, very contrasting to the childish 2007 graphics. I still thought this was extremely impressive. I decided that this game was really cool and nostalgic, and I was going to share it with some people on the forums. This is when I finally noticed that something was off. When I opened the ROBLOX site, it wasn't like it normally was. Instead of the normal blue bar on the top of the screen, there was a baby blue bar and a giant banner. The text was all written in Comic Sans. Even stranger, though, was the front page. Now, normally the top games were Jailbreak and Work at a Pizza Place, with usually around 16,000 players or so. However, the most popular game only had about 60 people online, and I forget what it was titled, but it was something like "CAN U ESCAPE BERNEY?????? *NEW*" When I clicked on the Forums, there was no "All Things Roblox", instead, there was "General Discussion", which was a forum I remembered posting on all the time, but hadn't been around for several years (almost 10 if I recall right). It suddenly became very clear what was happening, but you do need to understand that in my mind I of course did not believe time travel was actually real, much less that it could be done from a virtual computer video game. I became curious as to what would happen if I set the device to a date before ROBLOX existed. I chose Nov. 3, 1995. Honestly, I wasn't really sure what to expect, but I pulled the giant lever and waited to see what would happen. Once again, the transition scene occurred, but I did not get transported to a crappy looking PlayStation game. Instead, ROBLOX simply closed down. This is when several errors start appearing on my screen, complaining about things like missing DLLs, files, etc. Nothing would open at all, and eventually, the entire system crashed. When I rebooted, I was simply greeted with a blank screen. I rebooted at least 3 times and after an hour, I had decided that the machine was borked. I didn't have a Windows 10 CD as I had upgraded to it from Windows 7, so I inserted my Windows 7 CD and rebooted. Before I inserted it however, I noticed that my CD drive was not the normal CD drive that I had. Instead, it looked beige and like it belonged to an old computer. I inserted it, and after taking several minutes longer than usual to load, I was greeted with a giant blue screen, but it wasn't a blue screen of death. On the top left, it said "Windows 95 Setup". I was extremely confused as I had definitely inserted the Windows 7 CD. I ejected the CD - and sure enough - it said Windows 7 Home Premium, like it always had. I continued through the setup and the installation went like a standard 95 installation. It took several hours to install. During this time I could not use my phone - It could not find any Wi-Fi networks and there was "no service". I couldn't use my TV, either, as every time I had turned it on, I was greeted with a "no signal" message. At this point, I began to realize and actually fear that I had actually travelled back 22 years in the past. So finally, the installation had finished, and I was greeted with a Windows 95 desktop. I was incredibly confused. I tried to use my mouse - but of course, it didn't work. Surprisingly though, my keyboard worked just fine, so I used it to navigate through the operating system. I checked the date on the computer - Nov. 3, 1995. I finally realized the incredibly grave mistake I had just committed. When I realized it I opened Internet Explorer very fast and typed in www.roblox.com. I was greeted to a page that said that the page I was requesting did not exist. Yep. As ROBLOX had not been invented yet, I could not reach the time travelling place to go back to the present. Basically, this meant that I was now stuck in the past for at least 9 more years, probably longer, until I could go back. I decided that there was nothing I could really do, so I went to sleep. This was a bit of a mistake because when I woke up, my house was gone. No shit, my house was actually completely gone and I was sleeping on the grass. I guess since my current house was built in the 2000s, that meant it didn't really exist in 95. Well, I won't bore you with the details on how I made it through life, but I was able to get a pretty nice house by investing in various company stocks and I did live pretty comfortably for a while. Finally, the year 2006 comes around, and ROBLOX is now online and allowing registrations. I looked around for the time travelling place, and thankfully, it was there. I quickly signed up for an account, entered the game (and yes, the time machine looked exactly the same as it did in 2017), and set the date to Nov. 4, 2017. Sadly, I did lose all of my money and my nice house, but I was back in my bedroom, comfy and well. During this time period I did not physically nor biologically age, which is interesting, so I looked the exact same, although I was a pretty different person after that experience. I was happy to be back to my normal life, though. I also learned one thing - don't click any pop-ups. So yeah, if you see this place on ROBLOX, use extreme caution, and don't be an idiot and travel to a year when ROBLOX wasn't out.